The recent appearance by renowned biblical scholar Robert Alter at the Kansas City Public Library gave a large in-person and Zoom audience dozens of delightful moments from a serious man nearing the end of a terrific and consequential career.
The event was in memory of Matilda Rosenberg, former director of social work for Village Shalom and Aberdeen Village and long-time member of Congregation BIAV. More than 250 people attended on a snowy evening. In the subsequent week, the YouTube livestream (@kclibrary) recording of Dr. Alter’s talk was viewed over 2500 times.
As Alter acknowledged at the beginning of his remarks, a logical question is why anyone would do what he has done, which is to do a new translation of the entire Hebrew Bible. What's wrong with the old King James Version (KJV), which has been around since 1611? And what's wrong with the dozens of new translations that have appeared since the middle of the 20th century?
Well, let's start with the KJV, which Alter said he admires “in certain ways.” But that old version, he contends, “is seriously flawed, not just archaic.” And although he didn't mention it, it's also true that the translation team that produced it was working with far fewer and newer manuscripts than the more numerous and older manuscripts that have become available since then, especially with the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s.
Then let's consider what Alter, an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, calls the translations produced by “all these high-powered, denominational committees of scholars with degrees from Harvard and Yale and the University of Chicago and Oxford and Cambridge in England.”
First, Alter said, the KJV “is better than all these translations-by-committee done in the second half of the 20th Century.” There are, he said, “two things wrong in general with these translations. I have discovered as a translator of the Bible that it's a marvelous opportunity to conduct two simultaneous love affairs — with the Hebrew of the Bible and with the English language. And what I find in the modern translations is no love for either of those languages. I don't mean there's ignorance of those languages… but the Hebrew language (in academic settings) remains an object of study and analysis but not something that gets you excited, not something that enthralls you. And you can see that in the translations.”
Unlike the people who translated the Hebrew into the English of the KJV, he said, “the modern translators have a tin ear for the English language…” The result is that half of a verse sounds like a “government directive” and half like a “daily newspaper,” he said.
The result, Alter concluded, is that “I view the modern translations as execrable.”
If you watch Alter's entire library presentation, which you can do here, and which I highly recommend, you may agree with me that the thrust of it is a condemnation of biblical literalism, by which I mean reading the Bible as if every word were literally, historically and in all other ways accurate. That idea is called inerrantism, and it, too, is execrable.
I had a chance to have dinner with Alter after his Kansas City talk and I asked him whether I was interpreting his remarks as a rather harsh critique of biblical literalism. He agreed I was right. Then I asked him if there was anything useful we could learn from the literalists, knowing that often people with whom I disagree may still have something to teach me. Alter's answer: "No."
I'm not yet quite sure I buy his answer, but I've never found a good way to refute it.
Bill Tammeus is a former Kansas City Star faith columnist who blogs regularly about religion and ethics at “Bill's Faith Matters blog,” billtammeus.typepad.com.